Getting an Arm Up on Progress

Today, the team has been working diligently on revising and fixing the arm. An old servo was used to test a program for the arm. Since the current servos are not able to be controlled by angle positions, the electronics and programming teams ran a series of tests. The tests were performed by cracking open a servo and attaching a fourth wire and running a program for it, multiple times. The fourth wire will be used to control the arm by angle measures of the servo.

While the electronics team worked on mastering soldering and figuring out a power budget, the programming team worked on learning how to control standard servos with the Propeller C language. The research team came to a consensus with choosing the type of a new battery. They chose a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery because it is safer than a Lithium Ion battery since it decreases the chances of an explosion that might occur with a regular Lithium ion or Lithium Polymer battery. They are still figuring out the exact amount of volts and amperes.While other teams were working, Caleb was drawing out a new schematic for the electronics circuit board.

Here are pictures Hayden is dismantling a servo for adding a new wire and Caleb working on the new schematic.